All posts tagged: apamemberinterview

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

Published by Jenni Sidey

Elena Comay del Junco is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the history of philosophy, primarily Ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy. Recent and forthcoming work includes essays on Aristotle’s and Ibn Sina’s accounts of love as well as a translation of Ibn Sina’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ. She also teaches and writes on questions of gender and feminism. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, she also writes criticism, poetry, and fiction; recent publications include an essay on the novelist Pierre Guyotat and a translation of an 18th-century comic opera about Aristotle’s sex life. What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it? I have bad habit of reading too many things at once, but among those is Rumi’s Masnavi, which I’ve been slowly working through in a bilingual edition to teach myself Persian. I’m about 1,200 of 24,000 couplets of the way in and would, at least on that basis, recommend it. The skepticism about the popularization of Rumi is in some sense justified—in addition to …

APA Member Interviews, Sharon Crasnow

APA Member Interviews, Sharon Crasnow

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sharon Crasnow works on epistemological issues in the methodology of the social sciences. Her focus is primarily on feminist epistemology and philosophy of science and conceptual and measurement issues in the social sciences. What excites you about philosophy? One of the most exciting things about philosophy is that it is a field in which you can explore almost anything. Even though much philosophy is exceedingly narrow, it doesn’t have to be! What is your favorite thing that you’ve written? I’d say that I have two favorite pieces. One is among my first publications, and the other is my most recent. The early one is “How Natural Can Ontology Be?” in Philosophy of Science, March 2000, and the recent one is “Objectivity and Measurement in Political Science,” in Philosophy of Science, 2026. These are papers for which the basic idea just came to me clearly, and although it took time to work out the details, I knew from the start what it was that I wanted to say. I still think that the main idea in …

APA Member Interview, Chloe W. Chang

APA Member Interview, Chloe W. Chang

Published by Jenni Sidey

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APA Member Interview, Christian Culak

APA Member Interview, Christian Culak

Published by Jenni Sidey

Christian Culak is a moral philosopher concurrently lecturing at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio. When he’s not corrupting the youth in academia, he’s corrupting musical genres with his personal music project. What are you working on right now? Currently I’m working on a virtue ethics approach to the issue of whether examples of moral badness should be allowed in machine learning with artificial moral agents. Motivating the side that we should do so is of special interest to me, with a focus on actions that are not wrong yet worse than morally indifferent. What do you like to do outside work? Music! Since 2013, I’ve had a DIY solo musical project called Culak. It’s mostly metal but aimed at conveying multifaceted experiences, which leads me to incorporate instruments that are unconventional to traditional metal like violin, synthesizer, piano, choir, and organ. One or two albums are released each year. There are 20 so far with the next fully written in pre-production. Strength training is also a hobby of …

APA Member Interview, Caroline Wall

APA Member Interview, Caroline Wall

Published by Jenni Sidey

Caroline Wall is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University who works in ethics, value theory, and 19th-century history of philosophy. She has published on Nietzsche’s account of value creation, and her current projects draw from figures such as Hegel, Scheler, and Cavell to respond to contemporary work in ethics. Link to your website: https://www.caroline-wall.com What are you working on right now? Too much. The main project right now is the dissertation: I’m trying to make the case that we should be concerned with cultivating not just human or universal virtues, but also individual virtues. My argument for this has three basic steps. First, having any ethical virtue involves, as a constitutive part, perceiving a relevant range of values correctly (e.g., part of being courageous is ascertaining what really is fearful, threatening, etc.). Second, values depend in part on what we are like as subjects. Third, and last, there are more specific kinds than humankind to which we belong that bear on what we’re like as subjects. I’m on a few other sidequests at the moment. …

APA Member Interview, Stacy S. Chen

APA Member Interview, Stacy S. Chen

Published by Jenni Sidey

Stacy S. Chen is a PhD candidate and SSHRC doctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in clinical ethics and global health ethics, informed by her background in international relations and bioethics. Professional Website:  www.stacyschen.com What are you working on right now? My doctoral research explores how decisions can be shaped in medical decision-making, and how this shaping impacts the physician-patient relationship and the process of informed consent. A central topic of my work is that the validity of a choice is not determined only by the nature of the options, but also by how the decision-making environment is constructed. Beyond my dissertation work in clinical bioethics, I am also interested in public health ethics, especially issues related to patient advocacy for immigrant and minority communities. What are you most proud of in your professional life? Since I work mostly in applied ethics, many of my students have little to no prior experience with philosophy. It makes me proud when my …

APA Member Interview, Phil Corkum

APA Member Interview, Phil Corkum

Published by Jenni Sidey

Phil Corkum is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta; he previously taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He works on ancient philosophy, the history of logic, and metaphysics; his Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics is now out with Cambridge University Press. http://philcorkum.com/Home.html Who is your favorite philosopher and why? Recently, after twenty-some years of teaching, a student finally approached me after the first class and asked who my favorite philosopher was. My response, waiting in readiness all these years—‘Me.’—did not impress. You, reader, are of course a close second. Who do you think is the most overrated/underrated philosopher?   I don’t know about ratings, either over- or under-. But the impact of a philosopher seems directly proportional to the ease with which their name admits of adjectival form. ‘Platonic’ rolls off the tongue. ‘Lewisian’ or ‘Rawlsian’ ain’t bad, either. On a side note: ‘Corkumian’? My career faces innate challenges; let’s just admit it. What are you working on right now? A venerable tradition in metaphysics holds that taking metaphysical inquiry to be objective, and so …

APA Member Interview: Sophie Grace Chappell

APA Member Interview: Sophie Grace Chappell

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. She has been Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly since 2021, and serves as a member of the APA’s LGBTQ representation committee. Her books include Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Hackett 2004), Knowing What To Do (OUP 2014), Epiphanies (OUP 2022), Trans Figured (Polity Press 2024), and A Philosopher Looks At Friendship (CUP 2024). She has also published a collection of poems, Songs For Winter Rain (Ellipsis Imprints 2024), and a new verse translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Ellipsis Imprints 2024). She recently completed her new verse translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and hopes to find a publisher for it soon. She lives in Dundee in Scotland, and climbs, skis, cycles, and plays the piano. OUPPS (Open University People Profile System) (PDF) Directory to my publications What is your favorite thing that you’ve written? The serious answer is Epiphanies (PDF) Introducing Epiphanies. A more flippant answer (which often feels true) is “Whatever I wrote last.” This Sappho translation isn’t quite the last thing I wrote, but …

APA Member Interview, Mark Coppenger

APA Member Interview, Mark Coppenger

Published by Jenni Sidey

Mark Coppenger (BA, Ouachita; PhD, Vanderbilt; MDiv, SWBTS) retired in 2019 as Professor of Christian Philosophy and Ethics at SBTS, having also taught full time at Wheaton (IL) and MBTS and as an adjunct at Elmhurst. He’s been a pastor and an infantry officer, and he posts at markcoppenger.com. How did you get into philosophy? My dad (PhD, Edinburgh) was teaching Bible, theology, and church history courses in a small Christian college that needed a philosophy teacher. They drafted him to fill the gap, so he took some summer courses at GWU and UC-Boulder to get up to speed. The family accompanied him on these trips, and I began to pick up on intriguing references to “dialectical materialism,” “John Dewey,” etc. I admired my dad, and the bug bit, so I chose to major in philosophy when I got to college. Before long, I was getting acquainted with the Pre-Socratics, loving aesthetics, and stumbling through Sartre and Gide in French. Behind it all was the sense that this would be a good mission field in …